So explain the logic that API abuse leads to inability to like or retweet a discussion of the company at fault on the service.

I have no idea what mental gymnastics they pulled, but off the cuff: if a company is a person, and the company is abusing my api, I feel like I have grounds to remove them from my platform or at least demonetize them. They are breaking the terms of service to which they agreed.

Well, they didn’t up until Elon took charge, so yes, Elon did this

But, he did. That's like saying "Hey, this company would have done this bad thing under any leadership, so let's not hold current leadership accountable." He bought it, all the shares, eliminated the board, eliminated leadership from many departments. He wanted it all, and now he has it, and so he's way more accountable for EVERY decision than the average CEO.

It's more "this bad thing isn't notable, it's just one of many events like it".

Musk draws negative attention like no figure in the modern era. He is just too fun to hate. This story amounts to a mildly anticompetitive action by a middle tier social network. It's just not a big deal[1] in any reasonable context. It's a front page freakout on HN only because Musk was involved[2].

We're here for entertainment value, basically. For myself: the Taibbi angle here is absolutely hilarious, given the level of spin in the "Twitter Files" you really would have thought the guy would have bought some loyalty, but Musk's brain doesn't work that way.

[1] But, of course, bad.

[2] c.f. all the front page coverage here of Tesla foibles that would be 100% ignored on the cars of any other manufacturer.

Unfortunately what EM does and Twitter does is being watched extremely closely by the entire tech industry, so like it or not it has massive ripple effects. We saw this when Twitter cut staff to a shoestring, and suddenly other companies also started cutting costs, assuming those costs were unnecessary overhead.

You're blaming the entire tech industry downturn on Twitter? That's just too much. They weren't even the first tech company to do layoffs!

Again, it's just too fun to pin this on the nutjob CEO with the bad takes. But step back and... it's just not that notable. Well, except for the employees laid off. I'm not saying I'd want to work for the guy, but even then "asshole tech bro CEOs" are a dime a dozen too.

No company slashed 90pct of staff in attempting to follow Twitter. Most just overhired during the pandemic. Twitter doesn't even have an ad sales team anymore.

I mostly agree with you, especially the Matt Taibbi thing, which gives me nostalgia for the weekly firings and excommunications Trump did to his loyal grovelers.

However, I resist letting this turn into merely a spectacle. I don't think it's a good idea to stop criticizing bad practices (in this case, making unwitting members of the public skeptical of links posted by independent journalists) just because it's fairly mundane in the scope of social media company practices. It's important to hold leadership accountable, but you're right that we shouldn't let Elon become the pariah for bad leadership/practices in way that lets others off the hook.

That’s 100% not what I’m saying. I literally said we should criticize Twitter for being stupid. I then said this sounds like something any stupid company would do, especially Twitter given their track record with 3rd party API and data access. I don’t find Elon’s position as CEO a notable detail here. People never criticized Dorsey for stupid Twitter stuff of yesteryear. They criticized Twitter.

It is not “stupid” to attempt to control use of your API, whether HN agrees or disagrees with your motives.

What is being discussed here, however, is whether using Twitter‘a web client to post a tweet containing a link to content on Substack is “abuse of Twitter’s API.”

Elon absolutely did this, and there is no “pretending” going on.

Would you have said "Dorsey did this" when Twitter made stupid API policy decisions previously? From what I recall, people criticized Twitter the corporation not Dorsey. That's my only point here, that it's weird to see all this Musk pile on in response to Twitter doing something completely believable (albeit dubious as you point out) when you factor in its previous actions.

> Would you have said "Dorsey did this" when Twitter made stupid API policy decisions previously?

That's an ad hominem tu quoque. If what you want to do is criticize the character of people criticizing Musk, carry on. But even if the person criticizing Elon is a serial murderer and leaves the toilet seat up, the truth or falsity of any statement they make is independent of their character.

If you have some argument to make about "Twitter" doing it and not "Elon," make that argument and we can discuss it. Speaking of which:

You can believe whatever you like about whether Twitter before Elon would or wouldn't have done things like ban Elon's Jet tracking account (they didn't), Bring white supremacists and Trump back (they didn't), ban journalists using a flimsy pretext of doxxing (they didn't), fire the trust and safety team (they didn't), &c. &c.

Point being, I am not giving you opinions, I am giving you facts about how Twitter under Musk is not like Twitter pre-Musk, and these are not trivial changes.

Then you add the fact that Musk himself brags to high heaven about how HE is changing things, and to boot, people talk to him on twitter and he says he will make changes.

All these things point to Musk personally taking responsibility for Twitter's actions. If he turns this around and the company ends up being worth $250 billion (his claim), do you think the world will say "That was Twitter, not Musk?"

So why when the company shits the bed shouldn't we say "That was Musk?"

> If you have some argument to make about "Twitter" doing it and not "Elon," make that argument and we can discuss it

That was my argument. I don't understand where this stuff about "criticizing the character of people criticizing Musk" comes from.

> This of course sounds totally stupid to us and we are right to criticize Twitter for blocking crawlers because a request is a request is a request.

Do you use or advocate using an email service that automatically blocks spam and phishing attempts? An email is an email an email.

Same with phone calls.

If you don't then do you post your phone number and email publicly like on HN, Twitter etc.? If not, why not?

Your analogy has a fatal flaw:

Both my email provider and I agree on what constitutes spam. It does not decide to block my emails containing a link to a competitor as “spam.”

It does not modify my emails to insert a “warning, this link is dangerous” page for my recipients.

If it does send an email of mine mentioning a competitor, it does not block my recipients from searching for my email.

If it did any of these things, no I would not use it, and yes I would lambaste such a company and its CEO.

———

Addendum:

But even if someone did use such an email service, and didn’t criticize the company or its CEO, that would have no bearing on whether their criticism of Musk was valid:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque